Author Archives: robhof

SF App Startup Cola Creates ‘Slack For The Rest Of Us’

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message thread 1

From my Forbes blog:

There’s no end of messaging apps that let you exchange texts, photos and videos with friends–Whatsapp, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook Messenger and so on. There are also a lot of business-oriented apps such as Slack, HipChat, and Yammer.

But what about a messaging app that lets you address the space in between entertainment and work, which is to say coordinating and planning activities with a few friends or coworkers? That’s what Cola aims to do.

Today the San Francisco-based startup is launching a limited, private beta test of an app that uses messaging as the basis for a wide variety of common things people want to get done, from figuring out where and when to meet with friends and creating joint to-do lists to tracking expenses at work and even engaging in multi-player games. The idea, says cofounder and CEO David Temkin, is that messaging has emerged as the most important function of a smartphone and even the foundation of many apps on the smartphone, from Uber to DoorDash to Venmo. “We are entering an era when messaging is the central app, like the browser was for the Web,” says Temkin.

Indeed, Temkin hopes to make Cola the first “messaging OS,” a platform on which activities that need to be coordinated among a small number of people can get done using messaging as the essential delivery mechanism. …

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Pandora Eyes Offline Mode For Its Music Service

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pandora

From my Forbes blog:

Despite the widespread and growing popularity of the streaming music service Pandora, it faces one big obstacle: If you’re offline, you’re out of luck.

But it’s clear that Pandora wants to fix that situation, especially since rivals such as Spotify and Apple Music have ways you can listen offline. Today at the M1 Summit mobile conference in San Francisco, a Pandora executive’s comments suggested that Pandora is seriously considering an offline mode.

The comments came in response to a question posed to several mobile companies on a panel, including Pandora and the mobile sports ticket service Gametime. “It’s something we’re looking at,” said Lisa Sullivan-Cross, vice president of growth marketing at Pandora. “It’s on our minds.”

Asked after the panel for more details, Sullivan-Cross declined to add much. “We know our customers want it,” she told Forbes. “I don’t know if or when.”

The company needs a boost. Competition from the likes of Apple Music and even Alphabet, the holding company for Google, is taking a toll on Pandora. …

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Turkeys + Dinner Plates = Thanksgiving: Google Tries to Make Machine Learning a Little More Human

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From my story in MIT Technology Review:

Google CEO Sundar Pichai told investors last month that advances in machine-learning technology would soon have an impact every product or service the company works on. “We are rethinking everything we are doing,” he said.

Part of that push to make its services smarter involves rethinking the way it’s employing machine learning, which enables computers to learn on their own from data. In short, Google is working to teach those systems to be a little more human.

Google discussed some of those efforts at a briefing Tuesday at its headquarters in Mountain View, California. “We’re at the Commander Data stage,” staff research engineer Pete Warden said in a reference to the emotionless android in the television show Star Trek: The Next Generation. “But we’re trying to get a bit more Counselor Troi into the system”—the starship Enterprise’s empathetic counselor. …

Read the full story.

This Number In Facebook’s Q3 Earnings Should Scare TV Networks

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fbq32015

From my Forbes blog:

Eight billion.

That’s how many videos people watch on Facebook every day, according to company comments after it reported third-quarter earnings today–and it’s double the number just seven months ago. More than anything–Facebook’s 45% ad revenue growth notwithstanding–that’s why companies that make their money on television advertising should be worried.

Granted, it’s easy to put too much stock into even a figure as eye-popping as 8 billion a day. Facebook counts any videos watched for as little as three seconds. And nearly all those videos are nothing like television shows or movies. Instead, they’re short videos of your child’s first steps along with trailers for actual shows and movies. So this is not yet prime time advertising as brand marketers think of it.

But what the 8 billion daily video views shows is that Facebook has arrived as a place where people are happy to watch videos of almost any kind–some 500 million people daily, in fact. Not only that, they’re doing so on the mobile devices where advertisers know they need to reach people–especially the younger people with disposable income–who have begun drifting away from linear television. …

What that means is that people on Facebook will now view video ads, the most lucrative kind of ad online or off, as a natural if not universally loved complement to the videos they’re already watching. At some point, ad spending on television–still the largest single place for marketers’ budgets–seems bound to shift at least in part to video ads. …

It’s clear that Facebook is now a force to be reckoned with in video advertising, something that seemed unthinkable just a couple of years ago.

Read the complete analysis.

The One Somewhat Bright Spot For Embattled Twitter: Advertising

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From my Forbes blog:

On a day when Twitter’s stock got hammered in after-hours trading, it’s hard to find a bright spot for the embattled company. But if there is one, it would be advertising.

It’s certainly not user growth, which rose only 8 percent from a year ago–the slowest yet, and one of the big reasons shares fell 13 percent in trading after the market close. That was the key takeaway in Twitter’s third-quarter results reported today.

And even on the advertising front, the news wasn’t all good. In particular, Twitter’s revenue guidance for the fourth quarter came in substantially below what analysts had been forecasting, though comments from Chief Financial Officer Anthony Noto on the conference call for analysts implied the company is being conservative about what is customarily a very strong December.

But while Twitter’s main focus remains getting more users and getting them to use Twitter more often, the bottom line ultimately is how much advertising revenues Twitter can generate. And few investors were complaining about the 60 percent jump in ad revenues, to $513 million. It would have been 67 percent if not for currency exchange rate changes. “Overall, the existing platform remains sufficiently differentiated and valuable to a sufficiently large group of advertisers,” Brian Wieser, an analyst with Pivotal Research Group, wrote in a note to clients. “We think investors should focus on the company’s revenue enhancement initiatives such as the growing use of video units” and other advertising opportunities.

Today, Twitter cited a raft of other promising signs around advertising. …

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Why Apple Pay’s Slow Start Doesn’t Mean It’s a Failure

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applepay

From my opinion piece in MIT Technology Review:

A year after Apple Pay was announced, the mobile wallet built into the iPhone doesn’t look as if it will “forever change the way all of us buy things,” as Apple CEO Tim Cook said it would.

Only 13 percent of people with phones that can use Apple Pay have tried it, according to a June survey by consumer research firm InfoScout and the payments industry site PYMNTS.com. The survey also found that only a third of iPhone 6 consumers who were in a store that takes Apple Pay actually used it, down from almost half three months earlier. On top of that, Apple Pay still accounts for only 1 percent of physical store transactions in the U.S.—a “microscopic” amount, says David S. Evans, founder of payments consultant Market Platform Dynamics.

What happened?

Exactly what we should have expected, actually. It was never a secret to those close to the payments and retail businesses that usage of Apple Pay would be slow to build. … But it’s too early to write the post-mortem on Apple Pay. In the space of a year, Apple has managed to make more headway than any other mobile wallet contender has to date. And several developments suggest that in the next couple of years, Tim Cook might be proved right after all. …

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Obama’s Campaign Data Wizardry Is About To Hit TV Ads

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Civis Analytics founder and CEO Dan Wagner

Civis Analytics founder and CEO Dan Wagner

From my Forbes blog:

By many accounts, President Barack Obama handily won the 2012 election partly thanks to his campaign’s use of data to supercharge voter outreach, fundraising, and TV ad buys.

Now, the two-year-old company formed by the campaign’s chief analytics officer and some of his team, whose operation was known as “the Cave,” is bringing that data science to bear on the cloistered world of television advertising. Today, Chicago-based Civis Analytics, which helps non-profit companies and corporations corral and analyze their disparate data, is announcing what it calls the first ad planning software that uses big data analytics to apply to television the kind of precise ad planning and targeting used to target online ads. …

Civis founder and CEO Dan Wagner says the company, which counts Alphabet (formerly Google) Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt as an investor, chose television for its new market not just for its sheer size but also because it works on relatively fuzzy data. “The underlying science in media planning hasn’t changed since the 1970s,” he says. “Chief marketing officers are fed up with the lack of credibility and accountability over a channel that accounts for a huge proportion of their budgets.” …

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Pingpad: A New Social Network For Getting Things Done

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Pingpad CEO and cofounder Ross Mayfield

Pingpad CEO and cofounder Ross Mayfield

From my Forbes blog:

There’s no lack of apps to communicate and collaborate with friends, family and colleagues. You use messaging apps such as Snapchat, WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger to ping friends, and maybe team collaboration darling Slack at work. You’ve got document sharing apps and services such as Google Docs, Quip or Microsoft Office Mobile, Dropbox for storing files, maybe Evernote for quick notes, and oh-so-many calendars for your job, your family, and your kids’ soccer teams. And of course there’s still email.

Whew. And therein lies the problem, says Ross Mayfield. The 44-year-old serial entrepreneur knows collaborative software, having co-founded Socialtext in 2002 to commercialize the seminal group-edited Web pages called wikis. Now, he believes that precisely because of the explosion of communications, collaboration, and productivity apps since then, there’s a need for a much more simple way to bring them all together. When Mayfield and his future wife were planning their wedding, for instance, he needed to use a wide array of apps and Web services to keep track of catering and location options, as well as arrange activities such as a wishing tree that required help from friends. The scattered nature of all those tools made it difficult for multiple people to use, especially on the go.

Today, Mayfield’s year-old startup, Pingpad, is launching a free app on Apple’s and Google’s app stores and a connected service on the Web that aims to elevate messaging into a way for people to get things done–and not just at work. Unlike at Socialtext and largely unlike most collaboration services all the way from Lotus Notes to Yammer to Slack, the nine-person company isn’t chiefly aimed at businesses. “We had a lot of innovation around collaboration in the 2000s,” he said in an interview in the makeshift upstairs office at his newly rented house near downtown Palo Alto. “But very little of it reached consumers.” …

Already, messaging has started to become something of an atomic unit of many kinds of apps. Even non-messaging apps such as Uber, Instagram, Meerkat, Facebook, and Twitter are appealing in part because they have short messages at their core to make their services quick and easy to use. That has some experts comparing the impact of messaging to that of operating systems such as Microsoft’s Windows that serve as platforms for many applications. “We see messaging as the new OS–all sorts of activity will happen inside of it,” says Marc Canter, co-founder of Cola, a messaging startup not quite ready to announce its service. …

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The One Killer Feature Apple TV Needs Is Still Missing

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tim-cook-apple-one-more-thing

From my Forbes blog:

As the new Apple TV video streamer debuts today, it is still missing the one key feature it needs to become a must-have device: TV programs and movies all its own.

The new version of Apple’s not-quite-a-hobby-anymore looks to be a major improvement over the existing hockey puck. It has a new remote control with a touchpad that will make Apple TV good for gaming, as well as voice control using Siri and an app store so other developers of games, video apps, and more can offer additional reasons to buy the device.

But most important, according to various reports, one most recently in Variety, Apple is currently exploring anew how it might boost Apple TV’s prospects by entering the growing fray in original video programming. Earlier, there were persistent reports that Apple would offer a Internet-based bundle of existing TV programming. But it’s believed that rights issues and a reluctance by programmers and networks to endanger their cash cows have stalled that service. “Original programming is the only solution to Apple’s biggest problem in the video world–that is, that nobody wants to sell Apple content rights,” says Forrester analyst James McQuivey.

Either way, it’s clear that Apple has designs on its own bundle of programming, especially programming no one else has, to drive more interest in all its devices. And now Apple TV may loom more important in that effort than it has so far. A stronger Apple move into television and online video is long overdue, but instead of the television set many people had expected for years, it appears that for now Apple TV is the horse the company plans to continue riding.

The challenge for Apple is that its rivals have galloped ahead of Apple TV, which hasn’t changed much in three years. … Given Apple TV’s solid but unspectacular base, original programming would offer the last piece that help recharge it into the home hub that Apple appears to want it to become. …

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